The lamplight flickered slightly as a gust of wind whistled down the chimney pipe. It scattered a tiny cloud of grey birch ash across the hearth stones. Davren Venn pulled his three-legged stool closer to the map table, leaning his braced left leg against the timber frame stand.
“It was late August of last year,” Davren began. His voice was calm and unrushed as he reconstructed the memory. “Three days before the early blizzard that locked the high passes. I had climbed alone from Alderfast’s western rim. It carried a forty-pound canvas pack, an iron-tipped ash staff, and Father’s old brass sighting compass. I broke through the last dwarf spruce at four thousand paces. Then, the sky turned the color of bruised slate. The heat dropped twenty degrees in half an hour.”
He tapped the point where his jagged cross lines ended against the high saddle.
“At the crest of the ridge, marking the ancient survey corps boundary between the basin and the high peaks, stands a massive monolith of coarse red granite—twelve feet high, four feet square, mortised straight into the bedrock doorstep. It was a royal earth-measuring marker, erected two hundred years ago during the Third Division Survey. On its south face, sheltered from the blizzard wind, the royal engineers had carved a complete earth-measuring index table.”
